As I’ve been reviewing this years work I discovered that things had gone definitely froggy. How does that happen? I really can’t say.
But I do think it’s important to pay attention to the images that haunt us. Frogs and toads are images of movement for me. But they also catch me on the corner of my self image. I tend to see myself as a frog.
972 Shelter from the Storm
Not green really. Just awkward. A bit off. Always a bit unsure of myself.
971 Waterlily Pond
But never without a sense of joy. I love frogs and find them often just part of the imagery I need to explore. And it’s just as well.
I was talking to a friend who wanted a quilt for her mother. She was looking over a number of quilts, none of them right. “Can you do it it Monet colors?” Well, yes. It’s not like I don’t like Monet colors. They were my childhood favorites. I grew up on them. By now I would say I out grew them. But they are pretty and they suit people’s needs. So off to sky blue pink land we go!
Actually color is the least difficult thing for an artist to change within their work. It’s a good exercise. Working with a color you just don’t like is a great way to stretch your art.
Most people who are not artists think of color in terms of the colors that look best on them. That’s deeply sensible. If it’s in your environment, you might as well feel pretty next to it. I spoke to one woman who had done interior design. She’d go into people’s closets and ask them for their favorite shirt or dress. Genius!
The best book on color choices I ever read came out in the late 1980s. Color Me Beautiful, divided people into warm and cool colors, clear and muddy colors, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. It was never foolproof, but for the most part it works for people. If you were a winter you would pick clean clear colors in jewel or ice tones. A fall would pick oranges, browns taupes and beiges. Knowing the colors that will suit yourself or suit others gives you a strong tool for making art you love and that others will love.
But past that, it’s always worth taking the color you really hate out and and using it. If you’re doing natural art, all the colors will come in eventually anyway. And if your being impressionistic, it never hurts to go to the colors you never use. Or that you’ve felt were worn out. You may surprise yourself.
For me, it’s always been peach. After she asked for some Monet colors it occurred to me that it might be my time to sit down and work with the colors that would make some people happier. Even yucky peach pink.
Commissions always ask more of us that we are used to. Sometimes they are an invitation to something new. Or a revisitation of something old. Or a stretch. Or an impossibility.
But it’s always good to stretch.
You’ll find Color Me Beautiful on Amazon. It’s an excellent way to explore the colors that make you your best.
I’ve worked on cleaning up the studio over the last two days. Finishing The Garth left me done in a lot of ways. It’s hard to change gears and start something new. Usually I fish around for what’s left over from something else to make something new. It’s kind of like stone soup. You start something out of pretty much nothing and throw things in. It works for me. It isn’t often I start something out of complete nothing. There’s something left over, and it needs it’s own place.
You can really measure time in objects. Certainly you can measure time in work you’ve done. I was thinking about how my work has changed over the years. I’ve been quilting since I was 21. I’m 68. I have had time to see the art quilt movement start, grow, boom, explode, and retreat a bit . But if I’m honest about it, much of what I did was about the fabrics that were available to me. So I thought I’d look back at some of my work, and show where it shifted for me. Please forgive some of these photos for their size and detail. Some of them are quite old and out of my hands.
Solid colors:
I made my first quilts as bed quilts. I made them. We used them. They died, as most bed quilts do.
After that I fell in love with Amish quilts. That kind of stitching can only show up on solids. They arrived on the quilt scene around in the beginning 1980’s . Of course I couldn’t hand stitch them either. I was a dreadful hand quilter always. I worked with a walking foot and quilting by counting four stitches over for each row.
Hand Dyed Cotton
I’d been dyeing fabric since I was ten. But it was a game changer when I started treating dyed fabric with sponge painting. It gave me a light source within the quilt that I didn’t need to piece.
Sheer Fabrics:
I discovered sheers and laces as applique for translucent things like water, air, fire and flower petals. It gave me a way of layering things objects. It’s a cool trick and I still use it.
Weird brocades:
I first came into fancy brocades at the textile discount outlet in Chicago. But I’ve hunted them ever since. They make magnificent bugs.
Hand Dyed Cheesecloth:
Hand dyed cheesecloth makes a marvelous sheer. And It acts just like cotton because it is cotton. Here I used it to make mountains, but I’ve used it for flowers, mushrooms, rocks, and all kinds of things. The texture is cool too.
Oil Stick Rubbed Fabric
Oil Rubbed Fabric.
For as much as I avoided prints and textures, I’ve now fallen in love with the textures I can create with paint stick rubbed fabrics.
As I was cleaning out my studio I found all of these things. Some of them I use constantly. Some of them I see as a thing I outgrew a while ago. But art is not measured by our products. It’s measured by learned skill, new ideas and inspiration in use.
I’ve been working on The Garth for a while now. A garth is an open air garden in a church. This one is my memory of Capestrano where there are roses and lizards throughout the garden.
I’ve gotten the lizard embroidered, used a rubbed piece of fabric that looks like mosaic. A couple of weeks ago, I added in roses.
It’s all well and good to plop an image in the center of a piece. But If you’re trying to build a visual path for the eye to travel, that won’t work. The eye needs a pathway. It needs to be led through the piece.
How do we do that? It helps that the lizard is off center. The roses are a start. But it helps that start to use small elements to build a path for the eye through your quilt.
I made a batch of butterflies to interview. I really couldn’t tell which ones were going to do what I wanted. I tried the green ones, the orange ones, and an orange one with small stones.
The pathway between the orange butterflies and the stones move this in a path I like alot.
I drew the path so you can see it. The lizard and the roses are very pretty, but the butterflies and stones build the path so your eye can take it all in.
I’m fascinated with the concept of the visual path, and I keep working towards building them within my works. It depends not only on the major imagery, but on the small details that place us on the path.
I remember being told I should color within the lines. It’s probably just as well I never was able to do that. I’m certainly not about to start now.
I’ve been totally hooked on paintstick rubbing. Like everything else, it’s a tool to be used with other tools. I’ve been exploring more and more how to incorporate different plates with each other in design. Here’s the latest batch.
I love them. And I’ve recently found some iridescent paint sticks in colors that didn’t come in the kits.
There’s only one limit I don’t like. The plates tend to be small. You can repeat all you like. But they don’t lend themselves to larger pieces. Not to worry. I decided there needed to be a way. I went looking for more kinds of rubbing plates. The choices are limited.
I tried drawing with glue on placemats. I tried carving foam. I got desperate and bought some fondant plates. All too small or not quite enough. Or a huge mess. Not satisfactory.
Not everything that works marvelously was made for that purpose. Some of the best tools of the quilt world have been borrowed from some odd places. My favorite thread bags were originally worm bags for fishing. Rotary cutters started as carpet cutters, I’m told. Surgical seam rippers really are a surgical tool some brilliant nurse brought in to their quilting studio.
So in that same spirit, I bought some ceiling tiles. They’re two feet by two feet. And beautiful! Stiff textured plastic. Exactly like a rubbing plate, only bigger.
Here’s what they look like rubbed. I’m in love!
So I’m not supposed to use ceiling tiles that way? Isn’t a good thing I didn’t pay any attention to those rules? I think so.
There aren’t many times in your life when you bring home a new sewing machine. Even for those who work in the industry, it’s a red letter day.
Thursday, I brought home a new to me (gently used ) 770 Bernina from Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilting in Oneida, IL. Don took this picture of me having fallen into the machine sewing. Yes. Like that. I sew until the machine and I are one.
I’m not a high tech girl, and I’ve worked most of my life on mechanical machines. But there are things about this bemouth that are to love. The throat size. The quiet motor. The speed of it. The excellence of the stitch.
My 630 is gratefully on the side as a backup, but I can see this new machine is going to take center stage of my sewing. It’s just as well the dogs and cats are banned from the studio, because I think it could eat a cat solid. We just won’t go there.
You don’t just buy a sewing machine. You buy the ability of a sewing machine. You buy the ability it gives you. I don’t need the embroidery capability. But this is the kind of solid sewing I crave, and what I test out every day doing the crazy stitching I do.
So this is what I did the first day I brought it home. I stitched my ass off for an afternoon, 12,000 stitches according to the machine! It ran like a top.
It needs a moth, I think!
Most of all, I’m touched by the support I’ve had. Don has believed in me and given me more backing than I’ve known in my life. He gave me my studio and walked me into get this machine. He leaves me amazed. He sits in the studio and cheers me on day after day. I adore him.
We kind of crisped our plastic purchasing it, but it was possible at all because people like you bought quilts and made it possible. The quilts are all still on sale until Sept. 21, in case you would like one, or like to help.
But all of you who helped me, bought quilts, backed me up, went to my classes, read my blogs and have wished me well, Thank you! You’ve made it possible for me to follow my art. You are a part of my heart and my heart.
You can hear me with my heart beating in time with the machine. I’m in love.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of doing a live Facebook show with Beth Rylander in her delightful shop, Feed Mill Fabrics and Quilting in Oneida, IL. I talked about free motion stitchery, and brouht in a small trunk show of work.
I’d visited Beth’s lovely shop, looking for a new Bernina. I believe I’ve found my machine, a lovely 770 that is coming in as an experienced machine someone has pre loved for me.
Today was so much fun! She does this every Saturday. She reaches out to her group by doing a live show weekly, so people can know what is new, fun, exciting and there for them.
Beth’s shop is stuffed stem to stern, and top to bottom with beautiful fabrics. And she not only sells Berninas, she has two lady mechanics. I’m impressed.
But her store bears something much more precious even that fabric. She has made a store in a feed mill in Oneida, that is a community for a huge circle of other women, like you and like I who love fabric, sewing, and each other’s company. What a quilting store does best is it makes community. Which is why all quilt stores are precious, and need our support. Because they support us all.
I’ve never understood people who worry about unfinished work. I treasure my unfinished quilts because they are springboards to more new quilts, just waiting for their time.
I learned a while back that it was easier to set the machines for one process and work a number of pieces at a time. It seems a bit scattered, but it works for me. I spent yesterday working on 8 quilts at once.
It makes sense to do all your dyeing at one time. It also works to do oil rubbed fabric in batches. I could do one at a time, but the mess is prodigious for both of those. Here’s the rubbed pieces of fabric I used for my quilt batch today.
Once I started straight stitching with metallic, some quilts needed more. Some need couching, some need extra flowers, some needed either applique or embroidered applique. So I line them up by the techniques involved. Then I set my machine for the next process and do them all at once.
It creates a lot of work in a hurry. Which is good right now because I’ve sold a number of small quilts over the sale, and am going to add these to the sale as soon as they’re done.
So, no guilt! Unfinished quilts are invitations to new work. And they finish quicker if you do each process at a time.
I find myself taking things in batches. Each quilt gets exactly what it needs. But I can work smoother and quicker by taking them in batches and working one process at a time, not just one quilt.
It’s the words no one wants to hear. Yes, if it’s stopped changing stitches, the board is probably going out soon. Gasp. No. It’s my machine!
Lots of desperation here. I do have backups, but they are not meant as major machines and they won’t back me up long.
My dear friend Elaine always knew when I called her at 7am, that I’d trashed my machine again. I’d call to ask if I could borrow hers. She’d thank me for having waited until 7, That bad.
I may be retired, but I’ve sewn and quilted all my life and probably will until they dig the final hole. I need a new machine.
But the other difference when you’re retired is that the easy money is much harder to find. So I’ve put all my quilts on a 40 % sale. I have a number of great new works at every price range. And I’m willing to let them go to make sure I can get a new machine. The sale will be on until September 21.
If you’ve been wanting a quilt of mine, this is the best time! The prices won’t go lower, because they really can’t. And I have some fabulous new work.
842 Hosta Moon
866 Arabesque Rose
IF you are new to my work, please take some time to see what I’ve made. I feel each quilt is a separate world of it’s own, there to warm you from your wall, visually.
Prices on the web page and on Etsy will show the full price and give you the discount in your cart.
